I found the job listing on LinkedIn and applied through Square's website. A Senior Technical Recruiter reached out to me over email within a few days and requested an initial phone screening call. The call with her went well and she described the interview process to me. It's composed of two main parts. The first part is a choice between a take-home assessment or a 60-minute technical interview with live programming. The second part is their virtual on-site, which is composed of five parts. The first part of the virtual on-site depends on your choice for the first step, either two one-hour interviews extending the work done in the take-home assessment, or two traditional pair programming interviews. The virtual on-site continues with a software design interview, a communication and collaboration interview, a leadership interview, and a final team-sit interview. Finally, she said that after the virtual on-site there is a hiring committee that makes a final decision based on the feedback from all of the previous interviews. For my application, in the first part, I chose the take-home assessment. The assessment asks you to write a small Android application focusing on grabbing data from an endpoint and displaying it in a modern UI. I felt that the assessment was very well designed and time-boxed and that the prompt was very thorough and made it clear what I should be doing, and how to excel in doing so. However, I feel like the criteria by which the assessment was judged did not match the criteria described in the prompt. The prompt makes it very clear that the assessment should take about 5 hours, and it specifies that the applicant should not exceed 8 hours. Furthermore, the prompt asks that the applicant do not develop features in addition to what is requested, as those may be asked for in the next interview. Finally, the prompt asks the applicant to write a README for the submitted project, explaining what was focused on, how long was spent on the project, and what would have been done differently with more time. I spent 6 hours working on the core of the assessment and then spent an additional 2 hours improving and documenting my work and writing the README. I ensured I met all the criteria described and presented good, clean, production-quality code. I thus chose to, following the clear instructions from the prompt, stop at 8 hours of work on this project. My submission was reviewed over the next 5 days. The recruiter reached out to me, and after a short call told me that they would not be moving forward with me in the application process. I asked them what their reasoning was, and if there was any feedback on my submission, and she said that the feedback provided by the reviewer was that the project was missing organization, testing, and error handling. I feel that this feedback does not match their expectations and their assessment prompt. My submission did include testing and error handling; it certainly could have been more thorough, but frankly, that is just not possible within the time allotted. Additionally, the assessment asked us to describe areas for improvement, and I specified that I knew the organization of the project was an area for improvement that I would have liked to have tackled given more time. This leaves me with one of two conclusions, either the prompt's time specificity does not matter, and Square expects candidates to submit 10-12+ hour projects for their 8-hour max assessment, or many other candidates are lying and asserting that their 12-hour submissions took them 6 hours, and the reviewers are unable to tell that a submission exceeded their criteria.